Fake Shot (Boston Rebels Book 2)

Present Day

“You need another?” Tiana asks as she glances up and sees me standing at the entrance to the galley in the back of the plane. Her voice is soft in the silence, but I don’t miss the notes of sympathy—and there’s nothing I hate more than someone feeling bad for me. I’m no one’s charity case.

“Please.” Even though I’m known for being the loud and crazy one, I keep my voice quiet. Behind me, the airplane is dark, and my teammates are still sleeping on our overnight flight back to Boston after tonight’s win in our last regular-season game. We clinched our playoff spot a while ago, and I can’t wait to have the next week off from games and travel before the first round starts.

As she turns and pulls out one of the sleek metal storage drawers, I stand here gritting my teeth. There was a time when I loved being on the road—the flights with my teammates, the hotel stays in different cities every night, and the endless stream of women. But maybe I really am the old man my teammates jokingly accuse me of becoming because, lately, the week-long road trips have me questioning how much longer I can do this.

For now, the perks of being the longest-running goalie in the NHL still outweigh the drawbacks. But I find myself wondering more and more often what it would be like to not be on the road for half the year. To eat meals at home, and sleep in my own bed every night. Lonely. It would be fucking lonely.

But the allure of my brand-new bed—in all its expensive, advanced-technology memory foam glory—is all I can think about as Tiana hands me two fresh bags of ice. Literally all I want in the world is to get home and crawl into bed.

I make my way back to my seat, rest the bags of ice on my knees, then recline until I’m lying almost vertical. I used to be able to sleep on these overnight flights, no problem. I’d be so exhausted coming out of those games, I could just close my eyes and drift off in these big, comfortable chairs the minute they dimmed the lights. But that was before everything hurt . . . before I started feeling way older than my age.

“You need to see the fucking trainer about your knees, not the flight attendant,” Drew mumbles from beside me.

Turning my head toward my seat mate, I find that he’s no longer asleep. “Most judges wear robes.”

“Dude, it’s not a judgment, it’s a fact. We’re about to start fighting for the Cup. You need to be in the best shape you’ve ever been in.”

I love it when these younger players talk to me like they know shit. Drew Jenkins has been in the league for six years, but it’s his first year with the Boston Rebels. For some players who come to the NHL out of college, like Drew did, six years can be an entire career. The conventional wisdom used to be that by thirty, you were on your way to retiring. Even though Drew’s career is finally taking off, he should know his place.

“Please, regale me with your knowledge about winning the Cup.” He rolls his eyes in response to my dry tone, but I continue. “Once you’ve won two, like I have, I might listen. And once you’ve been in the league for over a decade, you can tell me how to take care of myself. But for now, it’s past your bedtime. Go back to sleep.”

I don’t know why it brings me such joy to give him shit. Maybe I really am the overgrown child that my best friend and agent’s youngest sister, Jules, constantly accuses me of being. I can’t seem to stop antagonizing her either. To be fair, I’m only like this with people I care about.

If I don’t like you, you don’t exist. Period.

And as if the universe is trying to fuck with me, a text from my brother immediately follows that thought.

Gabriel

I need to know if you’re coming. It’s Mom and Dad’s 50th anniversary. Please tell me you’ll be there.

Gabriel

It’s been fifteen years. You have to be over this by now.

It’s five in the morning, which means we’ll be landing in Boston soon, and somewhere outside of Montreal, Gabriel probably just finished a shift at the hospital. He’s an ER doctor, because of course he is.

I stop pucks from going into a net, and he saves lives.

I power off my phone so I won’t be inundated with his messages—once he gets started, the texts just roll in. Drew’s watching me with interest, but this isn’t a conversation I want to have. So I close my eyes and turn my head away from him. Maybe I can catch a few minutes of sleep before we land.

“You sure you don’t want to come to breakfast with us?” Zach Reid asks as we’re wheeling our suitcases across the tarmac toward the parking lot at the private airport we flew into.

“Yeah,” I say. “Positive. The only thing I want to do right now is sleep.”

“You didn’t sleep at all on the plane, did you?” Drew asks.

“Not a wink.”

“You’re too old to pull all-nighters,” Ronan McCabe, our team captain, says.

“No shit, Cap.” I glance over at McCabe, and his lips are pressed into a thin line. I know he worries about how many years I have left in me. We’ve played together for a decade already, but I’ve got five years on him. I’ve never played anywhere but Boston, and I count myself lucky.

There are guys like Drew who have moved around at the end of every contract—though Boston just signed him for another six years, so he should be here for a while. Which is good, since he lives with and has a kid with Jameson’s other sister, Audrey.

“Don’t fucking call me that,” McCabe says. As always, his voice is a low growl.

This is an old argument, so I say the same thing I do every time. “Why? You’re our captain.”

He side-eyes me. “So are you.”

I’m not technically a captain, because the NHL’s rules don’t allow goaltenders to hold that role for logistical reasons—there would be too many delays if the goalie had to leave the crease every time he wanted to talk to the refs about a call.

So instead, McCabe took on that distinction, while I settled for the very unofficial title of “off-ice captain.” Sure, the guys generally look up to me because I’ve been here longer than anyone else, but McCabe is the one whose grumpy ass gets to lead this team officially.

He never treats me as anything less than an equal, but it still sucks sometimes knowing that I’ll never see that “C” on my jersey. Of all the things I’ve accomplished in my years in the league, I’m not sure anything would mean more than knowing my teammates, coaching staff, and the organization felt I was worthy of the title.

I roll my eyes and press the button on my key fob to open the trunk of my Porsche Cayenne. It’s rained while we’ve been gone, and my baby needs to be washed. I’ll drop her off with the valet in my building when I get home so she can get detailed.

Once I sling my suitcase into the trunk, I shut the liftgate and say goodbye to my teammates. As good as breakfast sounds right now, I need sleep more than anything.

Fifteen minutes later, I’m exiting the tunnel onto the surface roads leading to the Seaport, having navigated what would normally be a much longer drive in a short time thanks to the early Sunday morning lack of traffic. And that’s when I realize I never turned my phone back on. While waiting for a light, I power it up and set it on the charger. As it syncs up with my car, I see that I have 42 text notifications and 2 missed calls, which is not normal for 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

Most of the texts are from my brother, so I ignore those for now. But both calls are from the head of maintenance at my building, and that can’t be good.

“How could it possibly be this bad?” I ask Andy as I walk down the hallway from my front door toward my living room.

On the right, the entire ceiling above my kitchen has collapsed—drywall, plaster, insulation, and water cover every surface. Through what used to be a ceiling, you can see broken, soaked wood flooring, and the corner of either my washing machine or dryer is poking through, but is held in place by the splintered floor and the steel beams that support it. The walls of the kitchen are soaking wet, and the top cabinets look like they might fall off at any moment. As it is, we’re standing in at least an inch of water that’s spread down the hallway.

“It’s hard to know how long the water ran after the washing machine hose burst. But based on the damage, it seems like maybe it’s been running for days.”

We stop walking when we reach the wide stairs that lead to my sunken living room, which appears to have served as a waterfall area for the water to collect there. My couches are soaked, and the wooden table that normally sits between them is floating like a boat in several inches of water.

“Is it even safe to be standing here?” I ask him. “Given that the ceiling of my second floor collapsed, what’s stopping this area from collapsing into the condo below us?”

“Luckily, not enough water has soaked through this floor to cause that kind of collapse,” he says as he stands next to me in the blue uniform of our building’s maintenance crew.

“Just enough for my downstairs neighbor to notice water leaking?”

“Exactly. Thankfully, they noticed when they did, or it could have been a whole lot worse. We probably should get out of here,” he says. “I just wanted you to see what we’re into. The power’s off indefinitely, and the cleanup crew is on their way here. But . . .”

“But what?” I ask when he doesn’t finish the sentence.

“When I’ve seen damage this extensive before, it takes a long time to repair.”

“How long?”

“Months, probably.”

“Months?” I practically yell the question. What the hell? All I wanted was to come home, go to sleep, and enjoy this next week of no travel before we start our road to the Cup—because this year, this team . . . we have a serious shot at this. I don’t have time for this shit.

“Yeah. Everything the water touched will need to be ripped out. It takes time to dry things out so you don’t have a mold problem. Your electrical in all these rooms will probably need to be rewired. You’ll need new studs, walls, floors, ceilings, insulation . . . new everything, really. It’ll be more like a rebuild than a remodel.”

“How could one burst washing machine hose cause this much damage?”

“It wasn’t a slow leak, Colt. Water was coming out of that thing for at least a day or two. Think how quickly your washing machine fills up when you turn it on, and now imagine all that water running out of a hose for that long.” He nods his chin toward my front door, and I follow him to my entryway and out into the hallway.

“How far did the damage spread? Am I going to be repairing my neighbors’ places too?”

“It seems like we caught it before it got too far. Aside from the Millers below you, no one else has mentioned any damage. But you should call your insurance company because they’ll need to come in and do an estimate. They always try to low-ball you, so you might want to have a contractor here with you when they come in.”

I tilt my head all the way back and exhale, trying to release some of the tension in my neck and shoulders.

“Should I stick around for when the cleanup crew gets here?”

“You can. Or I can just have them take pictures of everything they have to dispose of, if you don’t want to wait around.”

“I haven’t slept in over twenty-four hours, so if I can get out of here and come back later, I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure. I’ll take care of it. Just text or call if you need me.”

“Thanks, Andy,” I say as I turn toward the elevator, rolling my suitcase behind me. I’m almost too tired to think, so I dial the one person who I’ve trusted to think for me over the past decade.

Two rings, and then Jameson growls, “It’s seven o’clock on Sunday morning.”

“Yeah, and I need a huge favor.”